WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Forty years ago, an Israeli archeologist uncovered what may be biblically-mentioned historical evidence of Israelites’ earliest presence in our homeland. This year, “the Palestinians” mockingly destroyed part of it. Some Israeli generals went there last week to raise public awareness. Time to put an end to these ongoing outrages?
This Week: Past Time To Protest “Palestinians” Bulldozing and Barbequing Our Heritage?
Even an out-of-shape secular Diaspora Jew (e.g., me, even decades ago) who on a hot sunny day hiked up the Snake Path to the top of Masada experienced emotions, looking down on the remains of the Roman siege ramp and square stone wall remains of the camp of the Legions of Rome, that he remembers a lifetime. Those and other indelible images there marked, save for the second century CE’s Bar Kochba Revolt, the final “ancient” chapter of our people’s never-thereafter-relinquished physical presence [it’s true, you can trust me, “I wrote a book on it,” Israel 3000 Years] in our Jewish national home.
Such a pilgrimage-present Jew likewise recalls what went through his head as he stretched out his open palms to press against the Western Wall – two-millennia-old huge stone remnant of the Second of two Jewish Temples that had successively stood in historic Jerusalem for a thousand years – “If this is papier mache,” I recall resolving, “I quit” – destroyed by Rome three years before snuffing out the last Zealots who hung on at Masada.
Let’s go back before those final ferocious [indeed, they were] 66-70 and 132-35 major wars between Judaean Jews [not Arab “Palestinians”] and imperial Rome. Before that, Maccabean homeland Jews, in a decades-long struggle, had thrown off the yoke of the Seleucid successors of Alexander the Great. Before that, it had been native Jewish kingdoms, Israel and Judah, that had defended their land against mighty Assyrian and Babylonian empires. Before that was King David, and wars between Israelites [not Palestinian Arabs] and Sea-Peoples Philistines.
But was there King David? During the twentieth century the pendulum swung from literal bible acceptance to skepticism rising to “King David was as real as King Arthur.” But then in the 1990’s an archeologist unearthed an enemy king’s inscription in the ninth century, just a century after King David’s time, boasting of victories over the northern kingdom of Israel and in electrifying words over “the House of David.” Archeological remains were soon unearthed, e.g., at Khirbet Qeiyafa and Tel Zayit evidencing a substantial Jerusalem-based David-time kingdom. And archeologist Eilat Mazar unearthed what may have been David’s fabled Jerusalem palace, and a wall maybe built by David’s son Solomon.
But let’s go back even further, to earliest Israelite presence in the land. I’d read a book decades ago, and began reading it again this week, for reasons you’ll see, about an Israeli archeologist, Adam Zertal, who claimed, widely pooh-poohed at the time, to have found at Mount Ebal what had been, three thousand-three hundred years ago, Joshua’s Altar (M. Machlin, Joshua’s Altar, The Dig at Mount Ebal). Zertal, a secular son of secular parents, had been grievously injured in the Yom Kippur War and over his years-long rehabilitation had driven himself to become a fully functioning (ask Indiana Jones what that takes) field archeologist. At the least, fully inspiring. But what’s that got to do with “This Week”?
A posting Friday, When Cultural Appropriation and Historical Revisionisn Are Acts of War, by Caroline Glick explains that. Glick’s lede: “Two weeks ago, a bus filled with veteran Israeli generals … slowly made its way up the slopes of Mt. Ebal in Northern Samaria to visit a biblical-era site that was severely damaged by a Palestinian Authority contractor in late January.” These IDF generals came there “to draw the public’s attention to the strategic implications of the war the Palestinians are waging against Jewish history.”
Glick summarizes substantial evidence, “widely accepted” today. that that the site is in fact 3,300 years old and a Jewish historical site, though many continue to dispute the specific identification with Joshua. She says that in January the Palestinian Authority posted a video on its site of part of the ancient wall surrounding the altar being destroyed to pave a road in the area. There were plenty of loose stones lying in the area for paving a road. “Instead, they brought a bulldozer all the way up here and deliberately destroyed 60 meters of the 3.250-year-old wall.” And there’s a mocking video of Palestinian Arabs barbequing on the altar itself. Glick charges that this destruction “is of a piece with the PA’s long-standing efforts to destroy the physical record of millennia-old Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel.” She cites other examples of destruction of Jewish historical sites and appropriation as “Palestinian” of others, and United Nations’ agency support for it.
But “the central focus” of Palestinian Arabs’ destructive activities, charges Glick, bulldozers and all, is the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, remains of which “alarmed archeologists” have collected and pored through at the Temple Mount Sifting Project on Mt. Scopus. “Over the next 20 years, thousands of artifacts were discovered by volunteers who sifted through the garbage to salvage them.”
All this would seemingly be enough to infuriate even Jews just lukewarm to their people’s heritage, but what I would leave with you this erev-Passover week is Caroline Glick’s summation of what’s going on here:
“In other words, the obliteration of the historical record is a fundamental feature of the Palestinian war to destroy Israel. Any acknowledgment of Jewish history in the Land of Israel risks revealing the otherwise-undeniable truth that the Jewish people are indigenous to the Land of Israel.
“…. Speaking to the generals, Katzover [Samaria Regional Council Chairman during Zertal’s excavations] said: ‘No nation would allow anyone to destroy its roots in this fashion, We, the Jewish people, have the deepest, most significant roots in our land of all humanity. It isn’t a surprise that the entire world is trying to deny these ties, by turning a blind eye to the destruction and claiming that the Cave of Machpela is a Palestinian heritage site.”
Glick cites Major General Gershon Hacohen, one of this week’s Ebal site visiting generals, recalling the PLO’s ambassador to Lebanon years ago revealing “the PLO’s true purpose when it calls for a so-called ‘two-state solution’ that would require Israel to withdraw from Judea and Samaria and northern, eastern and southern Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount”:
“’With the two-state solution,’ Zaki [the PLO Lebanon ambassador] said, ‘Israel will collapse, because if they get out of Jerusalem, what will become of all the talk about the Promised Land and the Chosen People? What will become of all the sacrifices they made – just to be told to leave? They consider Jerusalem to have a spiritual status. The Jews consider Judea and Samaria to be their historic dream. If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse. It will regress of its own accord. Then we will move forward.’”
I believe there’s at least a grain of truth in this. I recognize that I’m in the minority of American (though not Israeli) Jews in bitterly opposing the Biden administration advocating a “two-state solution based on the 1967 lines with mutually-agreed territorial adjustments.” I do not know whether the Biden administration even adheres to the old George Mitchell-era meaning of “Two-States” as “two states for two peoples,” which we have yet to hear coming from “Palestinians’” lips.
Here’s what Lee Bender, of blessed memory, and I wrote in our Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z (Pavilion Press, 2012) under “J – Jewish State – Fundamental Part of Two-State Solution” (emphasis added):
“What Palestinian Arabs Actually Mean by ‘Two States’”
“What do Palestinian Arabs really mean by ‘two states,’ and is this in synch with what the U.S. and Israel mean by it? Palestinian Arabs don’t mean ‘two states for two peoples,’ one state for Arabs and the other for Jews.
? “On the very day, September 23, 2011, that Abbas addressed the United Nations, seeking U.N. recognition of a western Palestine Arab state, YNetNews.com quoted Abbas:
“Abbas: No to Jewish state
“On Friday afternoon [9/23/11], Abbas said he was adamant about not recognizing Israel as the Jewish state.
“‘They talk to us about the Jewish state, but I respond to them with a final answer: We shall not recognize a Jewish state,’” Abbas said in a meeting with some 200 senior representatives of the Palestinian community in the US, shortly before taking the podium and delivering a speech at the United Nations General Assembly.
? “Caroline Glick’s Jerusalem Post column (Townhall.com, 8/5/11) quoted a senior P.A. negotiator’s statement showing clearly that Palestinian Arabs understand exactly what the U.S. and Israel mean by ‘two states for two peoples,’ and that they expressly reject it.
“Glick:
“Israel has no one to negotiate with because the Palestinians reject Israel’s right to exist. This much was made clear yet again last month when senior PA ‘negotiator’ Nabil Sha’ath said in an interview with Arabic News Broadcast, ‘The story of ‘two states for two peoples’ means that there will be a Jewish people over there and a Palestinian people here. We will never accept this’.”
Leave aside for the moment that a lowland narrow-in-the-middle Jewishly-meaningless sliver of Palestine would be militarily indefensible, as Col. Kemp and others have pointed out. A people passively acquiescing in open mocking destruction – bulldozers and barbeques even – of its professed homeland holy places will not long be respected as honoring its own homeland holy places.
“The Palestinians” have thrown down the gauntlet, that Palestine is theirs, not ours, has never ever historically been ours. And we respond by calling them “The Palestinians.” If this makes no sense to you, is disrespectful of our own people’s history, heritage and holy places, start by stopping calling these latecomers to our homeland “The Palestinians.” They’re not. But the Jews of the Land of Israel, Palestine, for the past three thousand years are.